Cloud computing is a means of providing service delivery for consumer and business needs in a simplified way, providing unbounded scale and differentiated quality of service. Businesses are looking to cloud computing to foster rapid innovation and decision making, for the agility needed to respond quickly in today's highly competitive environment, to reduce capital and operational costs, and an environment that scales easily to effectively meet customer needs.
Cloud computing enables organizations to provide reliable, on-demand services in a flexible and affordable manner offering the benefits of open standards, scalable systems and service oriented architecture. With these benefits also come new complexities that must be properly managed. These complexities include, for example,
Rapid growth of virtualized resources across multiple environments;
Relationship of virtualized resources to underlying physical infrastructure; and
Health monitoring and problem determination across a physical and virtualized infrastructure.
In particular, cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC. Typical cloud computing providers deliver common business applications online which are accessed from a web browser on a personal computer, while the software and data are stored on servers. This is a constraint of the current paradigm of cloud computing infrastructure which consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built on servers which perform the processing requirements, to be accessed by the web browser, for example, on a personal computer.
In general, cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure, instead avoiding capital expenditure by renting usage from a third-party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. This, though, requires a server layer which consists of computer hardware and/or computer software products that are specifically designed for the delivery of cloud services, including multi-core processors, cloud-specific operating systems and combined offerings. During heavy workloads or demand, this can place a strain on the servers, slowing services.
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described herein above.